Major traffic delays at end for Charles Miller Road project, engineer says

McHENRY – The major traffic delays caused by the widening of Charles J. Miller Road are pretty much at an end, an engineer for the project said.

The construction is part of a two-phase project that will widen the two-lane Charles Miller Road to four lanes and construct a second two-lane bridge over the Fox River to create two lanes of traffic in each direction.

The steel beams for the second bridge were set in place and completed Thursday.

This portion of the project caused lengthy lane closures, said Tom McQuillan, an engineer with HR Green who is consulting on the McHenry County Division of Transportation project.

The next stage is laying the concrete deck on the new bridge and paving the two new lanes of Charles Miller Road, he said. This may result in some closures and traffic delays, but they should last about a day at a time.
Work on River Road also is set to start. No lane closures are expected.

The new bridge and the lanes are set to be paved by the second week of July, when traffic will be redirected to those lanes so that the two lanes making up Charles Miller Road can be removed and reconstructed, McQuillan said.

The old bridge won’t be resurfaced, he said. Instead, crews will repair the joints and patch.

Flooding has pushed back the timeline, but not by the full two weeks that were lost. Because it was ahead of schedule before the flooding, it is currently less than a week behind.

There was a “little blurp with the flooding, but we’re trying to recover time,” McQuillan said.

Work was set to be completed by Oct. 15. Construction began in November.

For information and to sign up for updates on the the project, visit www.charlesmillerroad.com.